Corporate Giving - Are You Committed?

Corporate giving, corporate social responsibility, community relations – we hear about these important issues all the time. It’s supposedly essential for companies to give back to their communities – to help solve the ills that plague society. But is it really the role of business to address issues like hunger, natural disasters and poverty – or to support causes such as higher education or the arts? Shouldn’t business just be about customers, revenues and the bottom line? Considering that I personally spent six years in an organization dedicated largely to encouraging corporate philanthropy, I have to say that forward-thinking businesses should do more than care about their bottom line. And I’m happy to report that Denver – and our nation – is chock full of business leaders and employees who truly care about their community.

According to the 2009 State of Corporate Citizenship in the United States survey from the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship and The Hitachi Foundation, “In a strong signal that corporate social responsibility has earned a place alongside the bottom line, a survey of nearly 800 companies found most senior executives believe business should take a greater role solving problems in health care, product safety, education and climate change.” The survey results go on to show that “corporate citizenship is weathering the recession and is increasingly being integrated into business strategy and operations.”

I am proud to report that even though we are a small business, we believe in walking the proverbial walk. In addition to helping clients identify nonprofit partners and develop strategic corporate giving plans, GroundFloor Media donates up to 15% each year to nonprofits. Several years ago, GroundFloor Media chose Tennyson Center for Children, one of the Rocky Mountain region’s leading treatment and education centers for abused, neglected and at-risk youth, as its nonprofit partner and began providing pro bono PR services to the organization. Through its Get Grounded program, GroundFloor Media also allows its employees to get paid time off for volunteering and provides matching grants to organizations about which employees feel passionate.

And, GroundFloor Media is not alone. For instance, in 2008 Qdoba Mexican Grill adopted Starlight Children’s Foundation as its national charity partner, to which it donates funds, employee volunteer hours and food. Denver-based St. Mary Land & Exploration Company has sponsored the building of a Habitat for Humanity house each year for the past several years, sending employee volunteers to help with the construction, and in 2009, Pinnacol Assurance awarded more than $250,000 in scholarships to students through its foundation. And this is just a small sample of the many businesses doing great things in their communities and around the world.

But with all of the potential causes and issues out there, how does a company know which one (or ones) to support? A couple of tips to keep in mind:

• In order to ensure buy-in – and even enthusiasm – for the program among employees, it’s a good idea to survey them to identify causes that matter them. If a majority of your employees believe strongly in the need to help bolster public education, then that might be the way to go.
• It can also help give a company direction to consider what causes are most closely related to their product or mission. What can your company offer that others can’t? Take Tide’s Loads of Hope campaign for instance – by providing mobile laundry services to victims of natural disasters, they are building incredible good will through a very unique offering.
• And don’t forget to give employees ways to support their own personal causes, in addition to an overall cause for the corporation. This is a wonderful way to build employee morale and help ensure employee retention.

And, finally – because we would be remiss as a corporate citizen if we didn’t include a plug for our nonprofit partner in a blog post about corporate giving… For more information on how you can help Tennyson Center, be sure to tune in to 9NEWS in Denver on Thursday morning, March 4. Tennyson Center’s president and CEO will be on the 5:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. newscasts, and members of the Tennyson Center team will be taking calls about how individuals and groups can get involved.

Is There Such Thing as Work/Life Balance for Entrepreneurs?

They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are. —Aldous Huxley

When I first started GroundFloor Media in my basement in April 2001, I am fairly confident that I had absolutely no idea what it meant to have balance in my life. I was newly married, expecting our first child and had just received news that the company I had moved to Colorado to work for was closing its doors. I opened the agency (I use this term very loosely, as I was pretty much the janitor, the CPA and the PR account manager) the next day knowing that in the midst of the dot-com bust, I needed to create a professional opportunity and not wait for something to come my way. The funny thing was that although my bout as an entrepreneur began out of quiet desperation, I loved every minute of it. I had caught the proverbial entrepreneurial bug and I was sick.

To some of my friends and nearly all of my family, I quickly became a work-a-holic. To others, I was simply living the life of an entrepreneur. It has been said “that those who are passionate about what they do, do it to extremes.”

If you haven’t read The E-Myth, it is a must-read for any entrepreneur. The author, Michael Gerber, describes the tipping point as this, “It could have been anything; it doesn't matter what. But one day, for apparently no reason, you were suddenly stricken with an Entrepreneurial Seizure. And from that day on your life was never to be the same.”

I couldn’t agree more. I also have to say that there is a point that is crossed in which the thing you are most passionate about becomes an addiction. Workaholism has become embedded in our culture. There are some that learn to balance and create space for the things they are most passionate about – be it their family, friends, charity work or travel. It took me a long, long time to realize that I was not solely responsible for the success and failure of the agency – that the amount of hours worked was not a direct correlation to the growth of the agency. To be brutally honest, I only recently allowed myself to work toward this ‘work/life blend’ because of the team I was surrounded by at GroundFloor Media. As a senior-level bunch, we all have to juggle family and work life. We termed our struggle as the ‘work/life blend’ because balance was simply out of the question. The bottom line is that I trusted the team was suffering from a similar type of 'seizure’ and that we would all hold each other up as a group. It didn’t hurt that we gravitate toward working with some pretty amazing client partners that hold similar values.

Honestly, I think this point of achieving a ‘work/life blend’ is different for each business and ultimately that the life of an entrepreneur will always be challenging. For me, I always appear to be one step away from having a life where work isn’t always in the back of my mind. I know this isn’t ideal, but it’s difficult not to be working on something that you want to see grow and succeed. I compare it – in the most simple terms – to parenthood.

What do you do to handle work/life balance? Is there balance in your life? Is there a blend in your life? What techniques do you find useful for adding more balance or blending all of the important components of your life?

Content is Still King, Especially at the Olympics

Every other year I get completely caught up in the Olympics, and although I’m a huge sports fan, I really don’t have much knowledge of most of the sports involved. But still, there I sit for roughly two weeks, transfixed on short track speed skating , snowboard cross , and curling (to name a few), yelling at the television as if I have a personal connection to each sport and to each athlete.

During a particularly tense moment in the men’s freestyle moguls , I started thinking about why people feel so connected to The Games. I can watch and enjoy just about any sport, but what makes the Olympics different are the stories behind many of the athletes. The stories that give us a personal connection to the athletes, what they’re trying to accomplish, and the road they had to take to get to get where they are.

It’s the same type of personal connection that draws people to social media. Think about the Twitter feeds or Flickr accounts that you enjoy most. Most likely they are the ones that surprise you with a couple posts or photos that let you know a little more about the user’s personality. They provide something that connects you to them beyond being just “a good source for industry information” or “the coffee shop that gives out coupons from time-to-time.” Successful social media content is appealing not because the owner calculates what people want to hear, but because it’s real. Great content has the ability to, for instance, make an average sports fan become inexplicably invested in the outcome of a sport he’s never actually watched.

As my eyes got a little misty when Canadian Alexandre Bilodeau hugged his brother (who has Cerebral paulsy and who Bilodeau called his inspiration) and became the first from his country to win a gold medal on Canadian soil, and later as the U.S. National Anthem played for Hannah Kearney (who was favored to win in ’06, but failed to make it out of the qualification round in Torino), it didn’t seem strange at all that I was up an hour later than usual and checking the TV listings for what was in store the following evening. Its amazing how good content and personal connections can move people to take action on any number of levels.

Media relations is all about the “relations”

With the Colorado Garden & Home Show kicking off this Saturday (Feb. 13 at 10 a.m.), it only seems appropriate to give a shout out to Denver’s media outlets. Recently, much of my work at GroundFloor Media has been handling crisis communication, social media and national media relations. But, I must admit that I have enjoyed rekindling my relationships with some of Denver’s long-time reporters and producers. In January, PRSA Colorado hosted an event called “A Media Roundtable: Breaking the News in 2010.” It was the perfect event to kick off 2010 and really helped our team get a jump start on the local media relations opportunities for this show. If you missed the event and are interested in learning “the most important thing PR people need to know about the media in 2010,” watch these videos.

We all witnessed social media hitting the mainstream in 2009; however, traditional media still plays an important role in communicating our clients’ news and events. While we developed a Twitter and Facebook strategy for the show and created a hashtag (#garden2010), we knew we needed to execute a strong local media relations campaign. Even with all the changes we have read about at The Denver Post and the merging of KDVR FOX31 and KWGN The Deuce, it was very refreshing to work with reporters/producers who are passionate about their work and most importantly, are committed to our community – as I have witnessed in working with so many of them over the years.

As the media landscape continues to change, my advice to any local business is to read and watch your local media. Follow the news outlet on Twitter. Become a fan on Facebook. Listen to the reporters/producers. Invite them to coffee for a “get to know you” session. Understand their interests and passions. And be aware of the beats/topics they like to cover. Then pitch story ideas that you know they will want to report on because it is the perfect fit. Media relations is all about the “relations” part. Start here and you are sure to have better success at garnering media coverage!

~ Jennifer Wills

Cheers to the Chamber!

I have two opportunities on my calendar later this week that wouldn’t be there had I not participated in Leadership Denver, so I thought this would be a good time to give a shout out to the Denver Metro Chamber Leadership Foundation.

I had the privilege last year of being part of the Leadership Denver Class of 2009 – the most fun class ever. Amidst the fun, we learned valuable lessons about our community and how we can make a difference. This Friday, I get to escort members of the class of 2010 to their school visit during Education Day. Since so many of our communities’ challenges stem from challenges faced by the education community, I found Education Day to be one of the most enlightening. Therefore, I’m excited to escort this year’s class to Arrupe Jesuit High School in northwest Denver. I am personally intrigued by Arrupe Jesuit’s innovative Corporate Work Study Program, and I look forward to learning more on Friday.

On Saturday, the class of 2009 will head to Tennyson Center for Children to complete another Home Makeover Day, during which we will paint and provide some TLC to the cottages in which the kids live. These days are extremely rewarding because of the service we’re able to provide to Tennyson Center and also because they allow our classmates to reconnect and remain in touch long after graduation from Leadership Denver.

I think most of us agree that it’s important to be involved in and give back to our community. Sometimes, though, it’s difficult to know where to start. If you’re in the Denver metro area and you feel like you need more information on how to get involved or more education about what areas need help, please consider signing up for one of the Metro Denver Chamber Leadership Foundation’s many programs, including Access Denver, Impact Denver or Leadership Denver, or the Downtown Denver Partnership’s Leadership Program. If you’re in the Boulder area, check out the Boulder Chamber’s Leadership Boulder County.

I promise you’ll find more ways to get involved and help out than you can count. Then it will be up to you to decide how to make the biggest impact!

The Human Element

As the emergence of the Internet, social media and mobile communication continue to steal attention from standbys like newspapers and magazines, I find more and more that the subsequent fast pace of our lives also begins to edge out basic people skills like having a conversation face-to-face or even picking up the phone. A recent Inc. article listing the Top 30 tips for using social media listed “interact with visitors – really” as their No. 7 tip and when social media is the option of choice, I definitely agree. In just the last week I’ve been faced with a number of situations that drove home the importance of the human element – and I wanted to share them here.

Last week I pitched some client news and spent the end of the week making follow-up calls. I was delighted to connect with a reporter who I hadn’t spoken with since her maternity leave, and we quickly jumped into a conversation about her baby and the fact that I am expecting in May. It was a delightful conversation that naturally flowed into the business at hand (the pitch) and wrapped up with a really nice, “I hope to be in touch again soon!” The human connection made all the difference and will be a strong element next time we speak.

In pitching the same news I was researching a blogger in Louisville, Kentucky who has a “pitch policy” on her blog site. The blogger had a section in the policy titled, “I’m a Person, You’re a Person” and went on to say, “Since I’m a real person and you’re a real person, I’d encourage you to make our interaction a person-to-person conversation instead of an e-mail blast to a marketing list. I like people, I don’t like e-mail marketing blasts.” I loved that! While a phone call or face-to-face meeting wasn’t the right way to kickoff a relationship with this blogger, she made it clear that if you do a little research, know who she is, treat her like a person and reveal your human side – your chances of being heard go way up. Her simple statement made a strong statement.

At GroundFloor Media we’re lucky to have a variety of clients from across verticals. At the end of the day, it’s really the relationships we form with clients – and prospective clients – that keep our interactions strong and drive the success we’re able to create for our clients and their brands. The Wall Street Journal, reporting from the National Retail Federation’s annual convention earlier this month, emphasized in this article that retailers not become so dependent on the Internet, social media or whatever else may develop that they lose touch with consumers. While we maintain friendships with our clients via Facebook, follow one another on Twitter and appreciate the occasional quick connection via text message, we also make it a point to meet face-to-face as often as possible to get to the heart of the relationship – the human element.

So, if you haven’t already done so today, make time this week to grab coffee with someone you haven’t seen face-to-face in awhile, or even pick up the phone to have a real conversation with someone who matters to you. If you’re like me, every day there are subtle reminders that the human element will make a difference!

First Responders: How Businesses Take Smart Action During Times of Crisis

Who hasn’t been impacted by the devastation of the massive earthquake that hit Haiti last week? The outpouring of relief efforts from individuals, communities and organizations has been praiseworthy. We learned many valuable lessons from Katrina, the most important being how to mobilize quickly and respond to a crisis in an appropriate manner. For businesses, there is a fine line between how to activate relief efforts that are not only good for their business, but are also good for the community, and how to not take advantage of a crisis in order to gain publicity. Most importantly, it has to fit the brand and make sense. Take Whole Foods, for example . The natural foods store created a Haitian Fund late last week to collect donations from all 289 stores nationwide. They are encouraging their staff and customers to make donations through the end of this month during checkout that will go directly to several organizations leading relief efforts in Haiti. Whole Foods is also working with vendors to deliver additional food and water to the country. I look forward to seeing their financial results, as I know it will be tremendous.

I’d be remiss to not mention one of my favorite businesses, TOMS Shoes. They kicked off a campaign within hours of the earthquake to donate $5 from every One for One purchase /content.asp?tid=510 to the relief in Haiti through Partners in Health for the first 48 hours after the crisis. And if you are a fan on Facebook, you received this information real time. In addition to their monetary donations for immediate disaster relief, they have more than 30,000 shoes scheduled to be distributed in Haiti in February to help with rebuilding efforts. You can’t get any smarter than TOMS Shoes. I’d love to sit in on one of their brainstorm meetings. Can you imagine the conversation: ”Hey, I know, how about we send 10,000 pairs of shoes to Haiti? No, make that 30,000.” And then not having someone say they couldn’t afford it. They are brilliant and true to their core. No marketing campaign could possibly impact shoe sales and create more loyal customers. In fact, I’m off to order my next pair online now.

Let’s not forget the American Red Cross . The organization pulled in major star power to encourage text-message donations for earthquake relief in Haiti last week. The Red Cross is the biggest relief organization with a system in place to receive such donations, which are sent by cell phone to 90999 and billed at $10 each to the cellphone account. According to a recent NY Times article the total raised, a small portion of which will be shared with other members of the Red Cross federation, puts the organization well ahead of other relief groups in fund-raising for operations in Haiti. As of late Sunday, the organization had collected pledges of $103 million, about $22 million of which came through the text-messaging program. However, lessons are already being learned because apparently the funds are only pledged (and therefore tied up) until people pay their cell phone bills. It will be interesting to see how this emerging form of new media evolves with regard to cause marketing efforts.

These are only a few examples out of many admirable businesses making a difference. Hopefully there will be hundreds more jumping in to help support organizations like the American Red Cross and others who have given their time, money and products to help the people of Haiti not only in the coming weeks but months ahead as they rebuild and rise above this catastrophe. Follow us on Twitter @GroundFloorPR to hear the latest on our clients who are joining the Haiti relief efforts. Challenge: how can your business help?

~ Amy